Gender Identities In Resisting Inequalities

Years of feminist research have taught us that gender is a significant component of
our identity. The script of gender may be provided by social norms but gender
remains integral to how a self experiences his or her identity, as well as to
how others identify one. Masculinity and femininity, as two dominant forms in
which one’s gender identity is manifested, are the object of study in the
articles being reviewed here. Manuella Ciotti’s edited Unsettling the
Archetypes: Femininities and Masculinities in Indian Politics is a collection
of articles which examines the effect on gender identities of political
struggles of non-elite groups in Indian society and they negotiate their gender
identity when they struggle against their non-elite status. Are they able to
escape their subordinate status in one matrix of hierarchy only by aligning
themselves with the symbols of dominance of another, gender based hierarchy?
Or, does their fight against caste based domination, for example, also free
them from the rigidity of the gender norms of their society? These articles
show, as the editor puts it in her introduction, that in these struggles,
‘gender archetypes are sometimes reshuffled but at other times are painfully
reinstated, … with the reproduction of unequal, violent and oppressive gender
regimes by these agentic practices’ (pp. 19–20).
We can try to understand how their struggle against
marginalization by lower caste or minority religious groups in India ironically
results in an entrenching of the dominant norms of masculinity and femininity
by looking specifically at some of the articles. Ever since R.W. Connell wrote
on hegemonic, marginalized and subordinate masculinities, many others have
followed her lead in exploring the forms in which masculinity is expressed
under conditions of strain. In this collection, Atreyee Sen’s article based on
field work done in 2005–2006 in a Muslim dominated urban slum in northern
Hyderabad looks at how Muslim male children, boys between the ages of 9 and 14,
respond to the violence of communal riots by displaying an aggressive
masculinity in the children’s armies (bacchon ki fauj) that they form. The mob
attacks on their neighbourhoods elicit in these male children a kind of hyper
masculinity which they express by policing and preventing any trade between the
Muslim residents of the slums and Hindus or any relationship between Muslim
women and Hindu men. Similarly, we find a discussion of the hyper
masculinization manifested by another marginalized group, the group of
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